


Battle Scars

by givemeunicorns



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M, Multi, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-10
Updated: 2014-09-10
Packaged: 2018-02-16 22:41:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2287079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/givemeunicorns/pseuds/givemeunicorns
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky appreciates Sam and Steve's scars. His own are different, they still hurt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Battle Scars

**Author's Note:**

> Done for the prompt-a-thon on my tumblr
> 
> Check me out: http://givemeunicorns.tumblr.com/
> 
> disclaimer: I don't own and I make no money

They all have scars. Even Steve. His skin heals fast than it used to but he's still human. 

Sam's got the on his shoulders, from years of getting jerked against the straps of his pack when a desert wind caught him wrong. He's got one behind his ear, from where his cousin hit a baseball through his Aunty's window and he got caught in the cross fire. He's got one on the inside of his right arm, where a bullet grazed him in the war. 

Steve's got stripes from bullet grazes too, almost too faded to see, but the scars on his back and belly, where the bullet ripped through him, are still new and fresh. There's a scar on his lip, almost invisible, but Bucky can feel it when he kisses him. 

The scars don't bother them, even when Bucky traces them with his fingers, fascinated by the feel of the flesh under his fingers and how they take the disfigured flesh so easily as part of themselves, how they don't feel the need to cover them. He wonders if a time will ever come when he feels that why.

His scars are bigger, deeper, uglier. He doesn't look at them in the mirror, doesn't like to see them when he's unclothed. The cover the left side of his body like a grotesque road map, deep lines and stark reminds of the hell he's faced to get here. They ring the place where his metal arm meets his body, wrap over his ribs, down his hip and ring his thigh. He doesn’t remember exactly how he got them but he's sure it's in the fall that too his arm. They're old and tough, but deep pitted valleys in his flesh that refuse to fade away. 

The first time Sam's lays his lips on them, Bucky nearly comes out of his skin. It doesn't hurt, not physically anyway, but it leaves a burning under his flesh that makes him shake apart. They let him go, move away, because coming into there arms in a state of undress is new, and they have always been gentle and understanding. But he reaches for them, snatches them back, apologizes stumbling out of his mouth. He's sorry he's broken, tells them they don't have to touch the ugliness on his skin. And Steve's lips curl up in that way they always do when he's sad, fingers coming through Bucky's hair.

“You have nothing to be sorry for, Bucky,” Sam tell him gently, in that voice that Sam always uses to talk to broken people, “I should have asked first. I apologize.”

Bucky sighed, brows furrowed and frustrated. He wants them to touch him, wants it more than anything, because wanting something and being able to have leaves him with a satisfaction he had all but forgotten. But his scars are ugly, their damning, not amount of love will ever, ever make them anything but a testament not just to what was do him, but to what he did. To the people he murdered, not just his missions, but the people in the way. Maria Stark, Renita, a thousand other people who's names he would never know. He's not the soldier anymore, Sam reminds him. The soldier wasn't him, Steve says. But at the end of the day, right mind of not, he knows it was his finger that pulled the trigger, with an eye and as skill that hydra didn't have to give him. 

“No,” he growls, almost at himself, searching for words, “I just..”

Sam's arm wraps around his waist, and Steve's hands run up his clothed thighs. It steadies him.

“It's just...I wasn't expecting it,” he shakes his head, “You don't...see them the way I do. They're, they're like an chemical burn, I'm afraid if you touch them, they'll hurt you too. I know it's stupid. I know it's just warped skin, but I'm not like you two. They're the marks of a monster. Not a hero.”

He knows their looking at each other of his shoulder.

“Buck,” Steve tells him, leans in to kiss his mouth, warm and solid, “I know you don't see it, because it's harder to see those thing from the inside, but what you did? What you've done? That's heroes work. They took every thing from you, took everything out of you, and you still beat them. You saved my life.”

“I shot you.”

“I dislocated your arm. I put you head lock until you passed out,” Steve countered, “Doesn't mean I wanted to.”

“He's right Bucky,” Sam said into the curve of his neck, “When someone gets shot and killed, you blame the person, not the gun. Pierce was the monster, Hydra is the monster. Not you. They used you like a tool, because they never believed you'd be strong enough to turn on them. But you were, and a lot less people are dead because of it.”

Bucky lets the words hit him like a punch in the chest. It's an old argument, but sometimes he wonders if he's starting to believe it. 

 


End file.
